


I’ll Bail You Out

by VigilantShadow



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast), The Adventure Zone: Amnesty (Podcast)
Genre: Character Study, Crack Treated Seriously, Gen, This is based off a stupid 2am conversation, big au, secret familial relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-10
Updated: 2019-04-10
Packaged: 2020-01-11 02:08:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18420642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VigilantShadow/pseuds/VigilantShadow
Summary: Growing up, Stern’s friends used to ask him whether it felt weird, having a niece that was only eight years younger than him.It wasn’t. Though sometimes it got a little bit trying, having to get her out of trouble.Or:Having an FBI agent snooping around town was already bad, as far as Aubrey was concerned. When that agent was also her uncle, that only made things worse. But hey, maybe she could leverage that to her favor.Or:Grace Adrianna Stern, formerly Grace Adrianna Little, taught her sons that if a family member got into trouble, they should bail them out first and request an explanation later. Mortimer Little taught his daughter the same.





	I’ll Bail You Out

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FaiaHae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FaiaHae/gifts).



> This fic is the result of a conversation with FaiaHae which took place at around 2 in the morning. We were trying to come up with a reason why the best lie Aubrey could come up with in the morgue was “I’m Stern’s FBI partner,” aside from the (definitely canon) reason “I panicked.” I mused that, while impersonating an FBI agent MAY have been pushing it a little, my mom’s family adheres to a policy of “if someone in the family does some stupid shit, bail them out if you can and then give them a talking to for being an idiot as soon as you got home.” That’s especially true for cousins and nieces that are only a little younger than you, because being close in age means being assigned their keeper. So uh. This crackfic happened. And then got more emotional than I intended.

“Could you show us any ID, or anything to back up this whole ‘I’m an agent’ thing?”

It took Stern a moment to register exactly what he’d just heard, then another to process the fact that Aubrey didn’t seem to be joking. Then, as Ned Chicane started digging for his driver’s license Stern started to wonder if maybe he’d just imagined this woman was Aubrey after all. Which meant that he looked like an idiot, needing someone to  _ ask  _ for his badge.

“I’m sorry, what am I thinking?” He asked, both her and himself. He tried to dismiss the uncanny resemblance. After all, the idea that one Aubrey M. Little, twenty-three years old and derelict of her  _ writing her father so he doesn’t call his brother in the middle of a case to worry about her being dead in a ditch somewhere  _ duties might have ended up in Kepler at the same time as him is ridiculous. It didn’t make this woman look any less like Aubrey. He swallowed and summoned up the will to ignore that, because he really needed to finish his introductions without looking even more incompetent.

“Slow!” She said, as he reached for his badge. He raised his eyebrow at her, pretending that she  _ was  _ Aubrey for a second. There was no way it was Aubrey, of course, because Aubrey wouldn’t be asking whether he was really an FBI agent. She raised an eyebrow back, exactly the same way Aubrey would.

Which wasn’t proof, of course, but did kind of  _ annoy him.  _ Well, if this was a game of chicken, he wasn’t going to lose. So he launched into his spiel: about how he knew it seemed strange to investigate Sasquatch, about how UP was a small team of agents investigating mysterious occurrences, etcetera etcetera. It’s a speech he’d already given in some form or another at least two dozen times vis a vis specifically Bigfoot, and countless more regarding all of his other cases, and even with all that practice he stumbled over it trying to figure out what’s going on.

Stern almost managed to get ahold of himself by the time he asked whether Amnesty Lodge had any open rooms. Then, the woman that looked exactly like his baby niece gestured at the absolutely spotless lobby and stuttered out some transparent excuse about the place being flea ridden. 

“Oh, a few bed bugs don’t scare me,” he shot back at her, trying to keep the nostalgia and confusion and just-a-little-bit-of-hurt off his face as he smiled politely. Part of his brain was still saying  _ there’s no way this is Aubrey  _ even as he leaned into the fact that the best way to catch Aubrey at a lie was to buy into it. She grinned in that way she always did as a teenager, after being caught.

Stern had never tried to imagine how he’d see Aubrey again. She’s just find some way to surprise him. Apparently that was futile, because there he was. Still surprised.

Stern found himself tempted to use uncle privileges, or at least FBI agent privileges, to drag her off into a corner and ask her what she was  _ thinking.  _ But no, calling her out in front of the  _ incredibly  _ suspicious people assembled in the lobby would only make her defensive and also get him labeled a giant buzzkill.  _ I’ll ask her later,  _ he thought, and fled the room with a vague excuse about doing his job.

* * *

Aubrey managed to keep a step ahead of Uncle Stanley for an entire sixteen hours before the tension got to her. It was the worst kind of tension, too, the kind that she was fairly sure nobody noticed except her and  _ maybe  _ her uncle, but which clung to the edges of everything she did. It made her dinner taste like awkwardness, made smiling at Dani seem forced, and stopped her from sleeping entirely.

Which was what had her knocking on Uncle Stanley’s door at four in the morning. He answered instantly, still in his shirt and button down and holding a notebook loosely in his free hand. 

“Oh. Hello, Aubrey,” he said, sounding just a little shocked. Which he shouldn’t have been. There were plenty of ways that she’d changed since the last time they’d seen each other. Since her mom’s funeral. But the part of her that could bullshit her way through pretty much any situation, until love of any kind got mixed into it? No. Not that.

Also, she was a little hurt that he’d assume she intended to avoid him forever, but she had no right to be upset on that account seeing as she’d been tempted to avoid him forever.

“Hey, Stanley.” Thankfully, the weirdness of the situation didn’t stop her from keeping her voice quiet like it sometimes did. The idea of someone stumbling on them just standing around and having a chat felt…dangerous.  _ Hey guys, I promise I’m on the up-and-up about the whole monster thing, hey, meet my uncle he’s real life Agent Mulder and he’s here to arrest Barclay.  _ Why couldn’t her life just go  _ well  _ for a couple months?

He frowned at her for a moment. It was that look he got on his face when he was trying to solve the Sudoku puzzles in the “expert” section of the book. Then he laughed – short, soft, more a particularly hurried breath than anything – and relaxed a little against the doorframe.

“Oh thank god, it  _ is  _ you.”

Aubrey tried to swallow her own laugh, but succeeded only in snorting. She froze, glancing up and down the hallway. Thankfully, no one seemed to have heard her.

“Who else would I be, Godzilla?” She almost said Bigfoot. If she didn’t personally know Bigfoot, she would’ve said Bigfoot.

He hid his face in his hand, which thankfully stopped him from seeing any indecision that might’ve leaked onto her face.

“Okay, sure, obviously it’s you,” he admitted, talking into his palm rather than to her. Then he ran his hand down his face and looked back down at her, “but when you didn’t say anything, I was beginning to think I’d stepped into some horrifying parallel dimension where we don’t know each other,” he grinned, and she almost believed it, “ _ Ms. Little. _ ”

“God,” she groaned, “ _ Ms. Little.  _ Who are you, Headmaster Beechum?”

They stood there for a moment, and she wished that there wasn’t an entire world of secret cryptids in the way of her just talking to him. Uncle Stanley, she realized, was one of the only family members she’d never actually missed on those nights that she sat in her motel room and pretended she wasn’t homesick. Between her mom, and her dad, and her grandma she’d never had the time. Which meant that all of the missing him which she  _ should  _ have been doing over the course of the past five years hit her along with the realization that she’d never be able to tell him anything.

“Yeah, well,  _ maybe  _ I wouldn’t have picked anything up from her if you didn’t get in trouble so often.”

“Well, maybe I wouldn’t have gotten in trouble so often if, uh…“

It was a joke, the start of a conversation they’ve had plenty of times before, stretching all the way back to when she was eleven, waiting on the bench outside Headmaster Beechum’s office with him sitting beside her. The first few times she’d felt bad about yanking him away from college, then grad school, then away from the job he’d just gotten, but school was two and a half hours from home and only fifteen minutes from the apartment Stanley had managed to keep hold of in the seven years between her truancy starting and her graduation. And while him assuring her she wasn’t a bother didn’t  _ really  _ help with the guilt, the fact that he did a  _ great  _ Headmaster Beechum impression did.

“You’re always gonna get in trouble, Aubrey,” Stanley said. It sounded just as fond and exasperated as it always had, but a lot more tired. He looked a lot more tired than she remembered. He hadn’t gotten all that much older, she wouldn’t have guessed it’d been five years, except for the fact that it seemed like he hadn’t slept for any of it.

“Yeah, okay, maybe,” she said back, because that was the next part of this little dance. She waited for his next line, for  _ if you get arrested, don’t expect me to come bail you out.  _

“Promise me you’ll try to keep out of too  _ much  _ trouble, though?” He asked instead. It took her a second to recalibrate, her mind knocked off its tracks by the sudden deviation. “Whatever you’re up to that has you pretending you don’t know me…promise me that I won’t regret not asking?”

She couldn’t, not honestly.

“I’ll do my best,” she said. It was also a lie, because at some point in the past five years he’d apparently gone from being a translator in the foreign services to an FBI agent hunting cryptids, and she doesn’t know how much of a change that’s caused in what he considered regrettable.

“And I  _ am  _ assuming you’re pretending not to know me?” He sounded slightly insulted, but not at all surprised.

“Yeah,” she replied, sheepishly.

“Cool. Just wanted to make sure.”

“It’s nothing personal, it’s just-“

Stanley stopped with a wave of his hand.

“If it’s got anything to do with the trouble you aren’t telling me about, I don’t want to know. Just,” he sighed, “take care of yourself, and if you ever change your mind…well. Something tells me I’ll be here for a while.”

She stifled the urge to say  _ I really hope not,  _ because it would’ve seemed mean instead of like she was worried about both of them, and managed “yeah,” instead.

“Well then. Do you want to come in? I’m just looking at some notes.”

She almost said yes. Even if she couldn’t mention the monsters, or the magical gates, or the fire powers, she could at least tell him about Kepler, and Dani, and even Dr. Bonkers. She wanted to. But the last time he’d tried to talk to her had been at her mom’s funeral, and that thought left her throat feeling dry.

“No I…now that we, uh, talked, I should probably go to sleep.”

“Sure, yeah, of course,” he said, and she pretended she was too tired to catch his obvious disappointment.

“We can…I mean…we should talk again. Sometime. Just not…”  _ in public,  _ she didn’t finish.

“Of course. Goodnight, Aubrey.”

She waved, and prepared to turn and flee back to her room. But his voice caught her.

“You should call your dad,” he said. “He worries about you.”

She swallowed.

“No I-“  _ I’m not ready to deal with what he might say.  _ She choked on the words, and found only silence left in their wake. Thankfully, she and Stanley had gotten pretty good at listening for the end of unfinished sentences.

“Can I tell him I saw you?”

“I mean-“  _ if he realizes I haven’t succeeded yet he might come get me. _

Stern hummed thoughtfully.

“How about I tell him I saw a girl that looked just like you…across the tracks of a train station in…” he squinted, “Virginia. How about that? I waved at her, and she waved back, and it must’ve been you because she had a rabbit. But you were gone by the time I got to the other platform.”

“Well,” she said, “that only  _ might’ve  _ been me, so, I can’t really say whether or not you can talk about that.”

He smiled, and she smiled, and then she wished him goodnight.

* * *

 

The interview with Todd Hinderflins, erstwhile manager of the water park “H2Whoah: That Was Fun,” went about as well as expected. Which was to say, not well.

Todd hadn’t known anything. Or rather, he’d known plenty of things he  _ thought  _ were important, and had told Stern so at length. Which meant Stern now knew much more about running a water park than he had twenty-four hours prior, but very little about what had spontaneously  _ destroyed one  _ in the middle of the night.

He wrote everything down, of course, because he was a consummate investigator if nothing else, and also because people got testy when he didn’t write down their statements. 

“Thank you for your time, Mr. Hinderflins,” Stern said, clicking his black pen – which was for statements – closed and reaching into his pocket for his blue pen – which was for evidence gathering. “Now, would it be possible for me to take a look around?”

“Anything to help catch whoever did this to my park.” Todd puffed up his skinny chest proudly. Then he frowned and leaned in a little closer to Stern, like he were trying to discuss some secret, “say, you’re part of the, uh, spooky FBI right?”

“Yes, Mr. Hinderflins,” Stern replied, already half tuned out of the conversation, because witness interviews  _ always  _ went this direction when said witness hadn’t actually  _ seen  _ anything paranormal.

“Do you think some kinda…spooky thing did this?”

“I try not to make assumptions. Now, uh, I should get to my investigation before it gets too dark.”

“Oh, yeah, sure. But if you find out, could you tell me?”

“Most likely not. My apologies. I would if I could.” Usually, that wasn’t a lie. When the people who were hurt by  _ whatever  _ Stern was investigating asked for closure it felt…cruel to tell them that whatever answers he found would be classified. In this case, however, he was fairly certain Todd was just being nosy, which put a sizeable dent in his guilt.

The actual investigation was just as informative as the interview. He found plenty of strange little things, plenty of burst pipes – despite the fact that all records indicated the park’s water pipes had been completely sealed up when the incident occurred – and shattered debris – despite the fact that there was no indication of any explosions – but nothing to  _ explain  _ things. Just a whole lot of chlorinated water in his shoes and even more  _ questions. _

He scribbled  _ some kind of domestic terrorism?  _ into his notes, then underneath it  _ or insurance fraud, look into Mr. Hinderflins.  _ Then  _ actually, if it’s insurance fraud, who cares? This town could use more money.  _ Then  _ don’t include that in your final report.  _ Stern took a deep breath and clicked his pen shut with more force than necessary. Which was ultimately futile, and probably bad for the pen’s lifespan, but made him feel a little better.

As Stern shoved his notebook into his jacket pocket, he caught sight of something glimmering in the water. He knelt down and picked it up, then almost dropped it again.

It was a little enamel pin, circular with a scrappy little cat face on it under bubble letters which spelled out ADOPT. And sure, it was possible that some Kepler native might have owned that exact pin. It could have been a coincidence.

“Hey, you think that girl that broke into my locker’s got anything to do with this?” Todd Flindershins voice called out from behind him. Stern jumped, carefully recomposed himself, and turned around.

“Girl?”

“Yeah, that redhead that came in and claimed she was working for the park owner. She broke into my locker and stole all my shit, uh, a day before The Incident,” Todd scratched his nose awkwardly, “uh, wait. Did Sheriff Owens not tell you?”

Stern took a deep breath and smiled.

“Oh, yeah, that girl. Of course.” He laughed, and it sounded fake in his own ears. “Sorry, I sometimes have trouble keeping track of the, uh, mundane pieces of evidence.”

Todd shrugged, and Stern could practically feel him writing him off as an idiot. Which, fine, that wasn’t his best cover. He’d have almost considered it fair play if the fact that Sheriff Owens had not, in fact, told him didn’t smart just a little. And, of course, there was still the matter of the pin.

Stern glanced down at his hand, and the one-eyed little stray on the pin winked at him. He remembered seeing it for the first time, when Aubrey had begged his mother to buy it after her birthday trip to the first cat café to open in the US. He remembered her proudly attaching it to her denim jacket, which at the time had far fewer pins than it had that morning in the lodge.

Stern tucked the pin into his pocket and hoped Aubrey wasn’t breaking her promise to him.

* * *

 

Aubrey should really stop assuming that her day couldn’t get any worse. And yet, as she sat in Ned’s hospital room and cried herself straight into a headache on Mama’s shoulder, she found herself thinking _this is the worst way this day could possibly go._ Which meant, naturally, that when she looked up she locked eyes with her Uncle Stanley, who was standing in the hallway and watching her with a blank expression.

Aubrey sniffed, forcing her shuddering breaths under control and pulling away from Mama.

“I’m gonna go get some water,” she said softly, wiping her eyes and trying to ignore the wobble in her voice.

“You sure? I can get it for you.” Mama’s expression was soft, and Aubrey almost gave into the urge to blurt out everything. Instead, she just nodded.

“Yeah I, I think I need to stretch my legs.”

At some point between her catching sight of him and leaving the room, Stanley had slipped off to a bench beside the vending machines, and was sitting with his legs crossed at the ankles with a notebook in his lap. He didn’t look up as she sat beside him, and the scratching of his pen on paper combined with the ticking of the clock behind them on the wall had her fidgeting by the time he cleared his throat.

“I’m sorry about Ned,” he said, still staring down at his notebook. She almost said  _ me too,  _ but then he might have said  _ what have you got to be sorry about?  _ Or at least given her a look that said  _ what have you got to be sorry about? _

The clock kept ticking behind them. The last time they sat side by side like this had been after the funeral, when there’d been another clock ticking behind them, only then it was on her grandma’s ancient couch instead of cold hospital furniture. 

As if she needed another reminder of the funeral.

“It’s…he’s gonna be okay,” she said, after the window for answering without it being obvious that  _ she  _ wasn’t okay had long since passed. 

He sighed, and finally looked up at her. She considered following his example, letting her eyes fall to her lap instead of meeting his gaze. Instead, she found herself staring back at him, trying to play spot the difference between the him-of-this-moment and the him-of-five-years-ago. Now-Stanley’s suit was nicer, the bags under his eyes a permanent fixture rather than the result of him taking a red eye from his station in Seoul to get to the funeral. His default expression had shifted from vaguely-thoughtful to vaguely-cheerful. That was it.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Yes. No. She couldn’t talk about it, not with him. He sighed again.

“Well,” he said, “if you change your mind, you know where to find me.” He stood, and it took Aubrey a moment to realize he was leaving. She tried to gather her voice up enough to say goodbye, but before she could he paused. “Stay safe, Aubrey.”

“I will,” she promised. 

“You won’t,” he said softly. Just a little bit fondly. “You’ll always get into trouble, just…don’t get into any danger I can’t bail you out of.”

She couldn’t bring herself to lie. He seemed to realize she couldn’t bring herself to lie. He smiled, a tight and unhappy thing, then turned on his heels and fled. She watched him go, wishing she could’ve brought herself to answer.

Then she caught sight of something shiny on the bench, next to where he’d been sitting. She reached over and picked it up.

As she reattached one of her favorite pins to its place of honor on her jacket, she wondered whether Stanley knew just how much trouble she was in, after all.

* * *

 

As a personal rule, Stern never deleted photographs. 

This meant that wading into the albums on his phone was an absolute nightmare, and the organizational structure of his pictures folder was so complex it rivaled UP’s bureaucracy. It also meant that he had a hold of memories that he might otherwise have lost.

For example: remembering the last time he saw Aubrey, sitting beside her in his parents’ living room after the funeral, was easy. The memory of the last time he spoke with her before that, the last time he spoke with her when she was  _ happy,  _ would have been impossible to keep track of if not for his hoarding of digital mementos.

Inside the folder labeled “2019” was a folder labeled “August.” Inside the folder labeled “August” was a folder labeled “family,” and inside  _ that  _ was one labeled “phone.” It was far emptier than the folder labeled “misc.,” which contained all the photos he’d been sent of the funeral services, but which he never checked. In fact, this folder contained only one image.

It was a screenshot of an old Snapchat of Aubrey, holding a tiny rabbit outside what seemed to be a university building. She was smiling. The picture was captioned “#FuckAnimalTesting.”

Because he still had the picture, and because he’d pulled it up immediately after their four am talk, he could recall clearly the conversation that followed.

“You know I work for the government, right?” He’d messaged her.

“Yep! And I still love you, despite your shortcomings,” she’d replied. Then, over another picture, this time of the rabbit sitting in a patch of green grass, “and so does Dr. Harris Bonkers, PhD!”

“I’m not bailing you out if you get arrested for rabbit crimes.”

“Yes you will,” she responded, along with an emoji. He couldn’t remember which one.

The last picture she’d ever received of  _ him,  _ which was buried somewhere in her own phone’s disorganized memory, was a selfie of his most unimpressed frown.

She’d almost replied “is this what  _ I’m  _ going to be like in 8 years? Are all 26 year olds this unfun? I’d rather be  _ dead _ .” Then, she panicked about the idea of him taking that seriously, because she was  _ pretty sure  _ people in their mid-twenties were always getting ready to panic about getting old and dying. 

So instead she’d closed out the last conversation they’d ever had, before everything changed:

“ /| |\

   * *

 > O <   <\- That’s me smiling, only I’m a rabbit!

   W “

* * *

 

Escaping her cell had gone…better than expected. Which, when she was figuring out her expectations, she hadn’t really counted “the ghost of Deputy Dewey” amongst her assets, so that wasn’t super hard. Her initial plan had just been “grab the bars and ask her magic to pretty please melt them.”

Instead, she got out of the cage, stood awkwardly in front of the body for a couple of minutes trying to decide if she should offer condolences to Dewey for his own death, and then began moving as quietly as possible toward the door out of the room.

She was reaching for the knob when her good luck ended, and the door opened to reveal Detective Meagan and her uncle standing side by side. She froze and, after glancing back and discovering that Deputy Dewey had thankfully hidden himself somehow, began wondering how screwed she was.

Telling the sheriff she was Uncle Stanley’s partner was a longshot. Or rather it seemed like a longshot when examined with any kind of scrutiny. Duck and Ned had certainly seemed to think so, which was kind of rude given that their lies that day were just as bad as hers, and they didn’t have the kind of insurance she did. Thought she did. Had thought she did. 

It hadn’t seemed risky at all when she said it; but as she met his eyes, registered the fact that he was managing  _ I’m not mad, just disappointed  _ way better than even her dad could, she realized she may have miscalculated.

Then he turned to Detective Meagan, and the disappointed tilt of his mouth reshaped itself into his most professional smile.

“Aw, it seems my partner got a little restless. I’m sorry about that.”

“Your…partner,” Detective Meagan repeated slowly.

“Yes, she gets, well. Overzealous. It’s all the undercover work, you see. She gets the urge to take things into her own hands. I’ll make sure to talk to her about it.” Stanley reached out and put a hand on Aubrey’s shoulder, guiding her out of the room. 

“Sir, she set her hands on fire, knocked me out, and when I woke up the deputy was  _ dead,  _ that’s more than just taking things into her own  _ hands. _ ”

Aubrey felt his grip tighten ever so slightly. Well, there went that secret. She tried her best not to go down the rabbit hole that was figuring out how much she’d have to tell him. Instead, she watched him as he looked over her head at Deputy Dewey’s body. He looked…sad, but completely unsurprised. She wondered what exactly he’d seen to make him look so unsurprised. No. That was another rabbit hole. No time for that, Aubrey.

“I mean no disrespect, Detective,” he said, voice unreadable, “but I’m fairly certain there’s nothing anyone could have done to save him.”

“But her hands-“

“I’ll talk to her about it,” he said, like Detective Meagan had just told him about some completely ordinary behavioral issue. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I hear there’s a Bigfoot that needs chasing.” He paused, and his expression softened for a moment. “My condolences. He was a good man.”

Without waiting for any further argument he marched off, pulling Aubrey with him with the sheer urgency of his steps. She glanced back at Detective Meagan, caught the mess of shock and grief on her face. 

“I’d like an explanation,” Stanley said, quietly, as they passed into the front room of the morgue. Aubrey gulped, suddenly wishing she’d taken the time to come up with that list of things to tell him after all. Then she realized the answer was  _ probably everything, and then hope I don’t regret it,  _ because he wasn’t demanding, he was asking, and he sounded very, very tired.

“Yeah,” she said. Then, “so, looks like I was right.”

“Hm?”

“You  _ will  _ always bail me out.”

He was silent for a long time, and each second passing was like sand slipping out of an hourglass straight into the pit of her stomach. Shit, she’d overextended. It’d been five years, and he’d changed after all, or maybe it was just that he only had so much patience for people that had  _ magic,  _ or maybe she was too flippant, or-

He pushed open the front door of the morgue. Guided them through it. Let it shut behind them with a solid thud.

And then he let go of her shoulder and started to laugh.

“I missed you,” he said, leaning back against the wall of the morgue, still struggling to get his smile under control.

“Same,” she replied, and felt herself smile in a way that  _ wasn’t  _ half terrified for the first time that day. A tension that had lingered in her brain like the white noise of powerlines  _ finally  _ let her be, and the relief was enough that she almost wasn’t nervous when he took a deep breath and said, business-like:

“So, what’s this I’m hearing about Sheriff Owens chasing Bigfoot through town?”


End file.
